What has been very interesting is to compare different schools of thought both in how to teach and how to ride. There's big money in becoming 'the last word' if you can syndicate and sell your way of training, like Parelli has done. (A very slick operation indeed, encompassing training courses, demonstrations, instructional book systems, videos, tv programmes, branded equipment etc)
Working through the books and videos, Parelli, Dorrence, Hemphling, Moffett and others is fascinating. Kim's best advice to me is that she tries to take out of each approach what will suit the individual horse, rider, their problems and how they respond.
I can see parallels in the dog training world, where getting a balanced approach to what does or doesn't work for each situation seems the healthiest solution for any trainer to take.
Janine, I liked this post, not because it was middle of the road, but because it was 'all inclusive'. Which is a principle that broadly applies to many things in life in general.
I have had to google the things like prong collar (probably seen and heard of it, but forgotten, over the years) and head halter (never heard of it), and others...but not because they are 'bad',...just 'other' than my immediate experience....which also does not make them 'bad'.
You all heard me say that I had a statistics professor in psychology grad school who with great success used a shock collar to train field competition labrador retrievers. I would not presume to tinker with the precision of the system he has developed.
What I can more accurately and more personally speak on is my job (and my training in the techniques I need to be proficient in) to best serve my clients.
In a given day, I may use Psychoanalytic, Gestalt, Adlerian, Rogerian, Cognitive-Behavioral, (as a few examples of clinical models of counseling therapy), each on a different client for a different situation.
OR, I may use each of these major approaches on a single given client over the course of six months,...as an exercise, or to find the exact approach which works the best for that individual. I tried to list them in the order of their evolution, i.e., the order in which they were in vogue in the academic community. You are free to google them, I'm too lazy to cite a litany references. My personal preferences may CBT, and secondly, Rogerian, for my purposes,....but that does not mean other counselors are wrong for using other models. And there are papers by the way, that extol the virtues of them all.
What I'm saying is that people have choices in life. An individual, a breed of dog, the individual dog, and the type of behaviors you are training, be it general or specific, are all factors to consider when selecting the tools to use to do this training.
What I am also saying is that words like always, never, only, best, worst, right, wrong, first, last, etc., are dangerous and ill-suited in broad general discussions.
Now you'll have to excuse me. Brutus is telling me he needs to go outside. He has me trained quite well. I do not know his method or model, but it worked for him...I am well-trained and know what I have to do.
